1. Field of the Disclosure
The present embodiments relates to methods, systems, and programs for deduplicating data in a storage device.
2. Description of the Related Art
Network storage, also referred to as network storage systems or storage systems, is computer data storage connected to a computer network providing data access to heterogeneous clients. Typically network storage systems process a large amount of Input/Output (IO) requests, and high availability, speed, and reliability are desirable characteristics of network storage.
Some storage systems keep data that may be repeated multiple times. For example, a storage system may provide backup for many desktop clients, and many of the clients may be running the same operating system, which causes the storage system to keep multiple copies of the same software.
Some storage systems analyze the stored data and aim at minimizing redundancy by keeping only one copy of data that has been stored multiple times, in a process that is often referred to us deduplication, deduplicating, or dedup for short. However, deduplicating data may be an expensive operation in terms of resource utilization, such as managing the fingerprints taken of each data block stored in the system.
It is in this context that embodiments arise.